This book is about cognitive architectures; i.e., it is about life-forms endowed with
particular corporeal identities, giving shape and meaningfulness to the environment
in which they are embedded, creating a dynamic world to which they are irresistibly
bound, in an essential dialectical relationship. A world where they evolve, making
their best effort to thrive, and in so doing, end up defining individual and collective
existential narratives. This book is also about embodied and non-embodied artificial
intelligent systems, human constructs, meant to be able to populate the human
world, capable of identifying different life contexts and behaving according to
human values and conventions, systems capable of performing tasks in a
human-like way. Finally, this book is about trying to grasp the essence of cognition,
here understood as the effective action that enables a cognitive entity to continue its
existence in a definite environment as it brings forth its world [3]. By creating
artificial environments where non-embodied artificial entities evolve, human beings
are ultimately looking for “those features of the world where the details do not
matter, where large equivalence classes of structure, action and so on lead to a deep
sameness of being”